# Readiness Gate - CI/CD Glossary Definition

> Readiness Gate: A readiness gate is a condition that must be satisfied before an instance or deployment is considered ready to receive traffic, letting a

Source: https://latchkey.dev/learn/ci-glossary/readiness-gate-gl20  
Updated: 2026-06-30

A readiness gate holds an instance out of rotation until a required condition is met.

Beyond a basic readiness probe, a readiness gate can require external state (such as a load balancer registering the instance) before traffic is routed, which prevents shifting load to a not-yet-ready target.

## Where this shows up in a real pipeline

A definition is only useful if you can recognise the thing in your own logs. In practice this concept surfaces when a job behaves differently between a local run and a runner, which is where most CI debugging starts.

- Compare a local run against a CI run of the same command before assuming a tool is at fault.
- Runner environments differ in shell, PATH, TTY availability, available memory, and disk. Most CI-only behaviour traces to one of those five.
- Pin tool versions so an environment difference cannot be introduced by an unrelated update.

## FAQ

### What is Readiness gate?

A readiness gate is a condition that must be satisfied before an instance or deployment is considered ready to receive traffic, letting a rollout wait on external signals.

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Latchkey runs CI/CD that repairs its own failures. Agent entry points: https://latchkey.dev/agent.txt, https://latchkey.dev/openapi.json, https://latchkey.dev/llms.txt